This invention relates to equipment for floor maintenance machines and, in particular, to floor cleaning implements, such as disc brushes or other scrubbing or polishing pads, for floor maintenance machines.
Floor maintenance machines or scrubbers provide an industrial strength way to clean dirty floor surfaces. Typically, an operator directs a floor maintenance machine over the surface to be cleaned by steering or guiding the floor maintenance machine. The large rotating brushes of the floor maintenance machine directly contact the floor surface to, with the help of the supplied cleaning liquid, loosen debris that is on the surface of the floor. Often, this debris is lifted from the floor and is then contained in a collection chamber on the floor maintenance machine.
The rotary brushes of these floor maintenance machines may take different forms. In some forms, the rotary brushes are axial face brushes or disc brushes in which the bristles are all generally parallel with the axis of brush rotation and the ends of the bristles are directed downward to contact the floor. In other forms, the rotary brushes are horizontal cylindrical brushes which rotate about an axis of rotation that is generally parallel with the surface to be cleaned. These brushes each provide a different type of cleaning action. Floor maintenance machines may incorporate one or both of these types of brushes as well as potentially other types of cleaning or scrubbing implements.
With reference being made to FIG. 2A-2E, a prior art disc brush 110 is illustrated having a brush face 112 for contact with the floor. This prior art disc brush 110 has a core 114 with a female portion 116 which is best illustrated unobstructed in FIGS. 2B and 2E. To permit this disc brush 110 to be rotationally driven about a central axis and to also provide a gimbal-like mechanism to permit the brush 110 to adjust to irregularly angled floor surfaces, this female portion 116 mates with a male portion 118 provided by a driver 120 as best illustrated in FIGS. 2A, 2C, and 2D. The star-shaped outer periphery 122 of the driver 120 provides eight teeth that nest into the star-shaped inner periphery 124 of the female portion 116 of the disc brush 110. As best illustrated in the top-down view of the interface in FIG. 2C, the star-shaped outer periphery 122 does not perfectly correspond in shape to the star-shaped inner periphery 124, as the troughs of the teeth are slightly deeper in the driver 120 than they are in the disc brush 110. Nonetheless, the profiles are shaped such that, upon axial rotation of the driver 120 by an attached motor 126, the slanted surfaces of the star-shaped outer periphery 122 of the driver 120 come into contact with the star-shaped inner periphery 124 of the disc brush 110 such that the angle of contact is slightly greater than 90 degrees with respect to the radial direction (i.e., a line perpendicular to a point of contact between the one of the teeth and a corresponding pocket that represents a vector of the applied force is angled somewhat radially outward to a purely angular direction having no radial component).